07.12.13

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In his own modest way, Eames Demetrios is probably the most ridiculously ambitious man you will ever meet, having devoted the last five years of his life to the dissemination of Kymaerica, his complete alternative mythology of our planet.

This parallel Earth is loosely based on Demetrios’s scouring the world for intriguing but insignificant objects – ruined shacks, dirt tracks that go nowhere, unusual discolorations on walls – and assigning meaning, recasting them as sites of great battles or gateways between dimensions.

Discover Kymaerica is a PowerPoint presentation and it’s most certainly not for everyone: Demetrios hurtles through a series of invented facts and stories at such a pace that you’ll inevitably lose the thread on several occasions.

But give yourself over to it and it’s an inspiring, entertaining hour – Demetrios gives you license to dip in and out of the presentation’s flow by providing equipment to sketch your own version of Kymaerica’s populace of undead lawyers, indestructible war kangaroos and creatures without metabolisms. Effectively it’s myth-creation as an art experiment, and it’s as art rather than a piece of theatre that this show is best understood and appreciated.

If you’ve ever seen David Lynch being interviewed you’ll have a sense of what Demetrios’s earnest delivery is like. Like Lynch, he’s generous in allowing your imagination to shape his worlds. Nobody’s asking you to live in Kymaerica, but it’s a fascinating place to visit.